The election in "Election" takes place in a high school. Reese Witherspoon plays a little go-getter named
Tracy Flick
, and she wants to be president of the student government. Actually, she wants to be president of the universe, but she has to start somewhere.

We see young Tracy through the eyes of her teacher, Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick). To Mr. McAllister, there's something just a bit scary about this chipper young go-getter, something unsavory, something even potentially evil. His obsession with her is irrational, and yet one wonders if this Tracy might not really be a monster, a kind of Hitler in the crib.

"Election," which opens today, is a black comedy that takes off in unexpected directions. The good guy of the story is a sad-sack histo ry teacher with a predilection for porn and a marriage that's failing. The villain is Miss Perfect. What makes the teacher the hero and the student the villain is hard to say. Tracy does nothing monumentally horrible. Yet the viewer looks at her smiling face and cold eyes and knows that person. Something inside just cringes.

We get a clue to Tracy's character in the first few minutes. She has an affair with one of her teachers (Mark Harelik, a former American Conservatory Theater actor), and when it's discovered, he's drummed out of the profession. Next thing he knows he's divorced and working a minimum-wage job in another state. Tracy is sorry, so sorry, and yet she's not sorry. Someone else's pain just doesn't penetrate. We realize: If something bad happens, it won't be to her.

That Tracy is both the perfect student and sexually amoral is an unexpected combination, but like everything else in "Election," which was directed by Alexander Payne ("Citizen Ruth"), it rings true. Characters are complicated in ways that make them stand out from the typical. Mr. McAllister is an upstanding fellow, a likable teacher, but he also has a secret stash of porn videos in his attic.

Motives are complicated, too. Mr. McAllister looks at Tracy and sees the face of selfishness, blind ambition, cruel power -- someone who can turn into a world-class menace if given half the chance. At the same time, he may just be frustrated that he's feeling middle- aged and has hit a dead end in his life. That he fears Tracy and at the same time finds her physically at tractive should say less about her and more about what's going on in his tortured mind.

And yet . . . Tracy is a sociopath. We can see it in Witherspoon's face -- what a fun, fierce actress she is. Just contemplating Tracy, who knows exactly where her life is going, makes her teacher, a lost and confused adult, go into a tailspin. Broderick has never been better. He's taking on water from his first minutes on screen, and soon he's sinking and flailing. Watching his misery is a perverse delight.

The screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, sees the lives of these suburban students and teachers through a prism of absurdity that refracts more truth than any straightforward telling.

Jessica Campbell is oddly moving as Tammy, a lesbian student who runs for president on the promise of abolishing the student government. Perrotta has said he got the idea for her character from Ross Perot's first presidential bid.

"Sometimes when I'm sad," Tammy says in a forlorn voice- over, "I look at the power station." It's all there in a single image. Suburban teen angst: a girl sitting in the grass, staring off at a power plant humming in the night.